


OK Computer

by EriksChampion



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 11:08:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 14,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EriksChampion/pseuds/EriksChampion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elusive glimpses into the life of Seto Kaiba: the interlocking layers of pride, determination, and vulnerability that are continually swirling just beneath the surface. Updated 2/2017</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Airbag

Airbag

Resurrected. That’s what all the papers say. At this very moment every newsstand in Japan is overflowing with legions of sleek, shiny magazine covers proclaiming this to be the dawn of a new era, a dissolution of everything old, ugly, and secret. Kaiba Corporation has been salvaged from the ashes, rescued from the gaping abyss of destruction, resurrected. A bold and daring hero has come charging into the midst of the battle with horns blazing, eyes firing sparks that could start electrical fires.

 I am that hero. I tore apart the crumbling façade of what Kaiba Corp once claimed to be. I dragged it kicking, screaming, and spitting into the open expanse of the 21st Century, and I have the bloody knuckles and bruised back to show for it.

 What makes it worthwhile is the thought that I’ve proved them all wrong. All of the investors who shredded their stock the instant that news of Gozaburo’s death plastered the papers—the same papers which now hail the new Kaiba Corp as Japan’s foremost corporate giant and technical marvel—all the half-dead old men that littered Gozaburo’s boardroom who could barely contain their contempt the first time I took his former seat, all the people who said I was too young, too inexperienced, too _idealistic_ to be worth their time, I can taste their humiliation on my tongue like acid.

 But I would be lying if I said that was the most meaningful part. Because it’s not—not even close. When I see the all those glossy, gleaming magazine covers featuring my face staring out at empty space, when I see Kaiba Corp’s stock towering towards the atmosphere, when I see the new ruby red and onyx black sport cars stacked outside my mansion like so many faceless playing cards, I know that this is not what I fought for.

 All the reporters always ask the same meaningless, monotonous question: How did I do it? How did I save my stepfather’s swarming cesspit of a company?

 The truth is: I didn’t.

 I don’t work for the six, seven figure salary, for the servants, for the respect of my employees or even the loyalty of my customers. I tore this company apart, ripped its eyes out of its sockets and chewed on its sinews. I came out crushed and crumbled, almost falling apart and barely breathing.

 I did it because I wanted to be able to look myself in the mirror and know that I had done one thing in my life that was right. I did it, and I will keep doing it. I will work myself to death every day if it means that I can sleep at night.

 I didn’t save this company. It saved me.

 

 


	2. Paranoid Android

Paranoid Android

Mokuba used to have trouble sleeping. There was something about the sudden absence of our parents that made him come to fear the cavernous dark and silence of the night—that gaping hole that we were falling through. He has improved significantly, but his insomnia used to be so severe that he would lie awake in bed at night, his heart racing and his eyes peeled for some threat that I couldn’t see. He came up with all sorts of crazy ideas that way.

It was the worst when we lived with Gozaburo. Upon our arrival, he convinced himself that the Kaiba mansion was haunted, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that he was wrong.

I remember one night I was up late, working at my desk in the library and surrounded by this dense, irritating silence, that kind that sits right between your eyes and skewers you. Suddenly, I got the feeling that I was being watched. There was some kind of muffled, breathy sound. It was like the bookcases were whispering about me. 

“Who’s there?”

No response.

I figured that I had imagined it. I hadn’t slept properly in weeks myself and I had been dragging myself through some of the denser textbooks in the library for the past several hours, so it was not out of the question to think that any strange noises I thought I was hearing were merely a by-product of sleep-deprivation and sheer mental exhaustion. And yet—

I shrugged off the feeling, I went to back to work. I was never _really_ alone in the mansion anyway, so maybe it didn’t even matter.

It wasn’t until Mokuba was standing beside me that I realized that my initial inclination had indeed been correct. He appeared so suddenly and so silently that I nearly stabbed his hand with my pencil when it appeared beside me on the table.

“God, Mokuba! You scared me! You’re not even supposed to be in here.” I was on the verge of telling him off for creeping down here in the middle of the night, threatening both our safety, when the tremor in his voice and tremble around his mouth caught my attention.

“Seto…I’m scared. I think there’s ghosts downstairs…”

“Ghosts don’t exist, Mokuba. Go back to sleep. You were just having a bad dream.” Sleep sounded good right then, to slowly fall deeper and deeper, maybe never coming back for air…

“I wasn’t asleep! And I heard them. There’s a lot of them! I’m not lying, I promise.” He looked sincere, frightened. His hands were cupped in little fists, his eyes overlarge and darting around the room—but mostly fixed on me.

My eyes hurt. My whole head hurt. “And what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Will you…check for me?” I did a bad job of masking my exasperation. We weren’t children anymore; I didn’t have time for these kinds of games and fantasies. But he looked so small, so shaken, in that big black room, standing beside my foreboding stack of textbooks. I needed to take a break anyway.

“Alright, alright. Where were these voices coming from?”

He was afraid to speak. As if the ghosts might spring on him should he dare disclose their location. But he managed to string some words together. “In…in the dining room.”

He followed me out of the library and down the stairs, fingers clenched tightly enough around my wrist to strangle it. I had to admit, at this time of night the hallways in Kaiba manor always seemed to get two steps longer for each step I took down them. That entire house had an almost nightmarish quality to it, the kind of nightmare where you keep opening doors and turning down halls, feeling the full weight of the structure amassing around and suffocating you the deeper into it you go. But there was no evidence of ghosts that I could see.

“You’re being paranoid.”

He shook his head. “Just wait till we get closer.”

And then I heard it. The low rumble of laughter, the sharp rattle of forks and knives, all emanating from the downstairs dining room that Gozaburo used to host his dinner parties. I carefully untangled Mokuba’s hand from mine, and told him to wait for me a few steps away from the door—I would go investigate for him.

By this point in the evening all serious talk of business had usually mutated into drunkenness and stupor, which made it easier for me to sneak in undetected. All the elaborate imported decorations that lined the walls didn’t hurt either. Crouched behind an overlarge statue of a glowering Montu, I could see the blurs of their flushed and bloated faces, stained red and sweating. Their voices echoed off the walls and off of every cold white china plate and crystal wineglass. The whole room stank. 

Gozaburo was positioned in the middle of the crowd, like a great blossoming sun that all the sad little planets clung to so desperately to for life and validation. I hated all of them, even then. They always looked at him before they opened their mouths, always nodded along with everything that he said and stumbled over themselves to apologize. They all laughed together like one giant, pulsating creature, incapable of standing or even thinking on its own without some kind of satellite-based guidance system.

Which was, ironically, the topic currently under discussion.

“Now we all know the paradox: The more we invest in more accurate guidance technologies, the less efficient the missiles become. I mean, if our entire staff of engineers was sitting around all day doing calculations to try and minimize the likelihood of civilian casualties, we would simply never get anything done. Sometimes these kinds of sacrifices are necessary.”

“But have you read some of these reports? Whole towns destroyed…and sometimes not even due to poor guidance technology just…carelessness. How do we justify that to investors?”

“The investors? Why do they have to know? Why would they _care_? Everyone knows that Kaiba Corp’s not a humanitarian agency. Hell, adopting those two kids is probably the closest thing to philanthropy that I’ve ever done!” Laughter.

“Listen.” He went on, beckoning them to lean in closer. “We gentlemen are part of a very select and important group of individuals. When the Industrial Revolution began, do you know what it did? It created a new world order, and not just between the industrialized nations and the rest, but between _individuals_. There emerged those who were ready to understand--to _manipulate_ the new technologies, and those that weren’t. The inventors, the bosses, the industry leaders, made the work of kings and queens look like child’s play. With time, they came to wield more power than whole national assemblies—prime ministers, presidents! They overcame the laws and restrictions, the rules that bind normal men down. They won the Earth for us, and now it is our job to carry on that legacy. It’s our job to replace the gods themselves, to recreate the world in _our_   image. Remember, we are not _destroying_ the world, we are _building_ it. That process is not always pretty, I’ll admit, but no one ever said that it was going to be.”

“And the investors…”

“Don’t need to know. There are some times when it does people best to not know where their money is coming from. If we all knew the explanation behind where everything came from, could we ever really be happy?”

“I didn’t know that you were so concerned about the emotional stability of our investors.” Chuckles.

“I’m more concerned about their intellectual capacity. Men, with our work here, we are doing something fundamentally _new_. We’ve studied the history of human progress and in just a few hundred years we’ve put to shame the thousands of years of human history that preceded us. And Kaiba Corp, in just over a decade, has shamed even that. Let me emphasize that we are fundamentally alone in this. Our mission and our vision is something that we simply cannot expect the common people to understand. If we told them too much too soon, before they were psychologically prepared to handle the truth, they would be overcome by anxiety and despair, and they would resent and impede us. But they’ll understand in time, once our new world is in place.”

“And how long do you think this will take? Surely it cannot be completed in your lifetime? In any of our lifetimes?”

He sighed. “Unfortunately I don’t believe that any of us shall live to see the full fruits of our labors. But that is where Seto comes in. It’s not an ideal situation I admit--I always thought Noa much more capable of carrying out my vision than that boy will ever be. But—I have hope that with the proper training and education…”

Now I understood why I had been studying nuclear physics for the past four hours. I snuck out the door and back into the hall, but that smell followed me. My hair smelled like alcohol and cigarettes for the rest of the night.

Now I knew why I never felt completely alone. Like someone was always watching me. Waiting for me.

I found Mokuba in the hall, practically dissolving into a puddle on the floor.  He grabbed me the instant I emerged.

“You were right, Mokuba. There are ghosts in there. But they won’t hurt you; they’ll be gone in the morning.” That seemed to calm him. He fell silent, stopped shaking, and for the first time in a long time he looked like he was ready to fall asleep.

I led him back to his room, put him to bed.

I couldn’t get to sleep that night, nor the night after. I think that night Mokuba gave his insomnia to me. Sometimes at night all I do is stare at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of exploding plaster. Sometimes I feel like it’s all about to cave in, and I think that a part of me is hoping for it.

I’m not paranoid. I just need some sleep.


	3. Subterranean Homesick Alien

Subterranean Homesick Alien

On some level, I’ve always known that I was different from the other kids. I didn’t play well with others. Other people always ended up ruining my plans, clumsily interpreting my visions, resulting in a finished product that was so grossly inferior to what I knew I was capable of producing on my own. The teachers said I was shy, but I knew that they were wrong. I had no trouble talking, communicating, giving directions. But no one listened properly, so I decided to stop wasting my time trying.

That was easy enough to do when I lived with my parents. Before their death I led a structured, yet simple life. Few demands were made on me to be sociable, and for the most part I was left to my own devices. When I think back on that time I don’t remember too many of the details. But I remember the freedom, the feeling of infallibility, the reckless weightlessness of escaping into my mind when the exterior world just didn’t cut it. Mokuba was the only one allowed to come into this world with me; he was the only one who would understand.

My lifestyle changed dramatically after ours parent’s death. My smooth, stable home life disintegrated into a frenzied merry-go-round of foster homes, orphanages, brightly colored classrooms and shining kaleidoscopes of noise and activity. I wasn’t accustomed to the high levels of external stimulation; I despised living in an environment that I couldn’t control. Needless to say, the other children didn’t take much to me either.

Who cares? I never wanted them to.

I remember one night in one of our temporary parent’s homes. They were serial foster parents—acquiring children like they were collector’s items. We had two more siblings at that time, one older than me, one younger.

Since Mokuba and I arrived at the house later than they did, custom dictated that we submit to their authority. There might have been parents in the house, but in our subterranean adolescent society, those boys were the real source of authority. We had our own rules, our own culture that lurked just beyond the visible spectrum and rendered adult rules thin and meaningless.

Our temporary parents had no idea. Adults can be so stupid.

They had a favorite game that they forced us to play nearly every night. While one person—usually Mokuba, since he was the youngest—sat outside our parent’s door to listen for any indication that they were awake, the other three would sit in a circle on the floor of our bedroom, skin scrubbed white under the moonlight that was streaming in through one giant window. We would take turns lying down on the floor, head against the dresser, eyes to the stars, completely still. The other two would inch closer, and closer, two big black shadows whispering amongst themselves like angry ghosts.

I told myself to take deep breaths. Deep, long, frigid gulps of stiff nighttime air. Just stay calm. Just...don’t die.

Then, they slipped a tie around my neck, cinched it tight till I could feel my body throw the panic switch. Then I felt nothing at all.

My body was gone. It fell off, and I floated up with the stars that just a moment ago had seemed so far away. I had no memories, no past to run from, no future rushing towards me. There was nothing to weigh me down. There was only this silence, a deep pool of happiness and peace that I could slowly sink into, and maybe never to come out of.

In my world there were white winged creatures that wrapped themselves around the world, made out of moonlight, breathing the dust of a thousand forgotten galaxies. There were howling golden figures, battling with giant blazing sabers, that looked like they had been forged at the center of the earth. They had the biggest and most beautiful eyes, and when they looked at me—me, no longer with a shell of a body to shield that thing I called myself—I felt like they really knew me. That—they not only saw—that they felt me.

In those moments I hung off the edge of death, I picked at the string of time and melted it into plasma in my fingers. I felt everything, saw every color that has never been named. I was completely—fundamentally—alone, and yet it was only when I woke up that I felt lonely.

My eyes always opened crying. They always asked me what I saw. I always lied. I couldn’t explain that feeling—how I felt like I had been alive for a thousand years, and that yet my life was only just beginning. I couldn’t put into words how this world no longer felt like home, how it never had, how all words and all numbers are always struggling to find a way back to where they originally came from, how everyone was so far apart and so incapable of seeing the world through the same set of eyes that—just perhaps—there was no point in trying to make anyone understand anything at all. 

I couldn’t explain how I felt homesick for a place I had never seen. How I missed someone that I had never met, how the only reason I existed in this world was because my body was glued to it. I couldn’t explain these feelings to myself, let alone articulate them to someone else. So I told them that I saw nothing and we switched places and played again.

And people wonder why I abandoned business for fantasy.

I don’t play that game anymore, I haven’t since we got packed up again and moved into another orphanage. But there are still times when I look to the sky, and wonder if there really ever was someone waiting up there for me. It’s stupid, but sometimes, surrounded by my reality of hard corners and sharply defined edges, rigid rules of right and wrong, what’s real and what’s not, I want a little ambiguity, I want to blow down a few walls.

Those kinds of rules never sat well with me.


	4. Exit Music (For a Film)

Exit Music (For a Film)

I’ve had many firsts in my life. New homes, new schools, new parents, my whole identity has essentially been disassembled and cobbled back together with the spare parts left lying around the warehouse of some giant industrial god with a twisted sense of humor.

The endless repairs, replacements, and readjustments are never easy, but they do become bearable. When your immediate environment is a continually shifting phantasmagoria of sensory experiences, the external gradually loses its importance. I simply stopped paying attention. Instead, what becomes most meaningful is what some might consider the most insubstantial: the interior landscape —the dreams, the imagination, so powerful in the mind and so acutely fleeting when exposed to the cold acid-washed scrutiny of the physical world.

I’ve developed a thick skin to the outside world, to erroneous judgement and shameless incompetence, the clumsiness, the impermanence of it all. The things we perceive as solid objects are just widely held ideas, we could change their shape or make them completely disappear if we told them to. And I do tell them to. I’ve come to understand that I am by and large independent of the constraints that confine most people.

That being said, despite all that I have been through, I must grudgingly admit that my second first day at Domino High School was perhaps one of the most difficult of my entire life.

Waking up was difficult enough. To sleep for months as a shell of a human being and suddenly wake up with a conscience is like reentering the Earth’s gravitational field after spending years serenely orbiting through the silence of space. I had to go through months of intensive physical therapy sessions, fumbling around like a child just learning to walk. I had to relearn how to navigate the world. I had to regrow my skin, resharpen my mind, regain my dignity.

The first few weeks were incredibly difficult. I felt like I had been fundamentally _reduced_ , like I was a silent image projected up on a wall. My own home felt like a museum--I could read the labels tacked up beside each of my possessions but I couldn’t touch them. I was essentially a void, an absence that needed to be filled, a massive feat of engineering that had crumpled under the force of a sudden gust of wind, leaving a team of highly trained engineers nonplussed and feeling strangely betrayed, pouring over their reams of blueprints and calculations and unable to determine where in all their faultless planning they had gone wrong.

For those first few weeks, I was a hole in the earth, some kind of mystery that needed to be solved. An incompletion.

It was Mokuba who tried the hardest to fill me, but by definition he couldn’t succeed. I had to fill this hole myself. Just as an historian attempts to recreate the past by delving into ancient texts, I had to restructure myself in the image of what I believed I had once been. This was an incredibly difficult task—impossible to complete linearly. Ongoing.

I looked through old photographs, news clippings, family records (there weren’t many), any legal or personal documents I could find that might allow me to ascertain even the most tremulous glimpse of my true identity. I carefully scrutinized the way people addressed me, the types of expectations they seemed to have regarding my behavior. I conducted interviews with my employees, business partners—all covertly, of course. But all I was doing was picking at shell casings. I still couldn’t see what had caused me to explode.

My employees taught me that I was to be respected, my partners that I was admired for my intelligence and incisive business decisions. Mokuba showed me that I could be kind, if pressed by the right set of external circumstances. I found nothing particularly wrong with this image that I had created, only I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was overlooking something fundamental, something that none of my previous experiments had yet been able to reveal to me.

I knew that until this piece was uncovered, I would remain hollow, a fragment of a person. If I failed in this reconstruction then I would grow smaller and smaller until I disappeared completely.

I felt compelled to understand, but the deeper I delved into trying to penetrate these mysteries, the more resistance I began to sense from the people around me. Mokuba especially tried to impede my progress. He withheld information from me, sometimes I think he lied to me, or at the very least avoided providing me with the complete truth that I so desperately desired. I believed that he was trying to sabotage me, and became even more determined to uncover these secrets on my own.

Months passed. I chose to temporarily relocate from the Kaiba Manor—its gaping open spaces seemed to only taunt me. Those rooms hung open like the holes in my understanding; negative space was already consuming me on the inside and I could not bear to see it reflected so potently all around me.

I never intended to return to Domino High School. Receiving a high school diploma seemed like a rather arbitrary landmark in the journey of child to adulthood—a path that I felt I had traversed several times already. However, the business world being what it is—a world of very strictly defined and stifling traditions—I was rather curtly informed by one of my associates that I would never be able to win the respect of some of our international partners without the minimum in formal education.

I wish I hadn’t listened. Had I been in a more stable and composed psychological state, I probably wouldn’t have.

The moment I set foot on the grounds of the school I felt that something had gone terribly wrong here. Another one of those engineering accidents. The whispers of the students, the darting in their eyes, the way they shied away from me in the hallways—it was unsettling. I was unnerved by the responses I received—largely because they seemed to be so motivated by fear. Up until now I had received mostly respect and admiration from my associates, and I didn’t understand why the response I observed here deviated so strongly from this previously established pattern.

I was intrigued, and apprehensive. I knew as I walked the halls and sat in my classrooms that this unusual reaction to my presence must be the key to understanding the piece that I was missing, and the thought that the truth might be nearby flooded me with an icy prick of exhilaration. I had one missing piece left in the puzzle, and I was running my finger around the edge of the space where it must surely fit, almost able to imagine that I was squeezing it in my hand. Finally, soon, I would see everything.

I was still imaging what the final image would reveal when it punched me in the face. Leaving my last class, I was assaulted by a fierce and gruesome boy with unkempt hair who moved like an oversized animal. He knocked me over.

 “What the _hell_ was that for?”

“Are you kidding me? What the hell do you think it was for, you sick bastard! The nerve of you—daring to show your face here again after what you did to us? You should be rotting in prison--or worse! Figures the rich kids always get off.” He snorted, almost spit on me, and looked ready to gouge my eyes out. This was incomprehensible.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah, yeah? Maybe you want me to remind you then, eh?” He had raised his fist and was about to punch me again when a smaller boy rushed to his side and tried to restrain his arm.

“Jounouchi-kun, what are you doing?! Please don’t get yourself into trouble again, not now!” Something in this little boy seemed to soothe the first one, throw some water on his fire, though he still smelled like he was burning.

“But how can you just let him walk around here, flaunting that he got away with it?! He tried to kill us!”

I looked into that little boy’s eyes, at first glance wide, watery, and soft. But they were rimmed around the edges like a barbed-wire fence, and it unearthed something inside me. A string tied to something I had buried deep down and hoped to forget. There was some kind of raging hate in him.

“I know, Jounouchi…” he murmured, “But I think that Kaiba-kun is going through a very hard time right now. I think that he’s…trying to find himself.” He smiled. “It will be alright.”

He snorted. “You’re too nice, Yuugi. I know Kaiba and I know that he’s evil straight down to the core.”

Yuugi looked sorrowful for a moment. And then he looked at me again with those eyes. “C’mon, Jounouchi,” he said. “Let’s go home. Goodbye Kaiba-kun, I’ll see you tomorrow!”

The two went down the hall, the taller one not failing to give me a deathly glare over his shoulder as he went.

And now the puzzle was complete. I finally knew what knowledge Mokuba had been trying to protect me from. I knew what kind of object I was.

As they left, I muttered after them, “Had to get your girlfriend to come calm you down, did you? She must keep you on a tight leash.”


	5. Let Down

Let Down

“You’re very great, you know that?” Pause. “You’ve accomplished many things that I could never hope to achieve in all my time on earth.” He sighs, searching for the thing to say that will pacify me. But it doesn’t exist. I know that and he doesn’t.

“I don’t need your _sympathy_.”

“I’m not offering you any sympathy, Kaiba. I’m giving you my respect.”

“I don’t need that either! Just get the fuck off my island!”

He draws back, startled, almost hurt, and like a wave rippling through water everything changes for a moment then suddenly goes back to exactly the way it was before, only completely different.

“I just wanted you to know, Kaiba-kun.” He stammers. “That’s all.”

“You think I care about your _respect_?! You think that I need it, that I _want_ it? You—you’re nothing compared to me! I don’t need you to tell me that!”

He looks scared. He should be. Walking back to the elevator, he looks over his shoulder at me one last time and tries to smile. He’s such a little boy.

\--

Outside, Mokuba had been standing still, ear pressed against against his brother’s door, for the past half hour. At first it had been rough--he had heard a fury of crashing, cursing, things being torn apart. But now there was only silence—either a sign that Seto had calmed down, or an indication that something far worse was going on. Mokuba pressed his hand against the face of the door--it was so smooth. Mokuba was acutely aware of how loudly he was breathing, how big his feet were and how he couldn’t seem to stop making noise every time he moved them. He was sure that Seto must know that he was on the other side, and yet--he wasn’t acting like he knew.

“Hello, Mokuba,” Isis’ voice was smooth and measured. “Is Seto inside?”

Mokuba started and stumbled in his reply, “He is…but I don’t think you want to go in there. And I bet he doesn’t want visitors.”

“Yes, I can understand that,” she nodded, her expression both detached and incisive. “But I think he might appreciate what I have to say.”

“I’m not so sure…” Mokuba squared his shoulders and scrutinized her face. She smiled back, calmly. “Look—I’m sure you don’t mean any harm, but I don’t think Seto needs any guests right now.”

“That may very well be true, but I wish not to come to Seto as a guest, but as a friend.”

She continued to look down at him, open-faced, arms hanging loosely at her sides.

Mokuba leaned back into his heels. “What do you want with him?”

For a moment, Isis’ eyes seemed faraway. She pursed her lips to hold in a sigh. “Your brother initiated this tournament as a favor to me, did you know that?” She paused, and Mokuba noticed her stealing a tremor into her fist. “I’m afraid that I must ask to impinge on her generosity one more time.”

Mokuba sucked the inside of his lip. “Seto told me that he started the tournament so that he could find all the God cards…”

Isis nodded. “I know. He did that as a favor to me--though he did not know that at the time...”

“So why’d you lie? What are _you_ getting out of all this?”

Isis’ eyes widened momentarily--then she inclined her head and hummed. “I asked Seto to organize this tournament in an attempt to bring my brother back to me. Malik...he--he has been quite cruel to all your friends. Our lives have not been easy, and over time he has strayed quite far from his true nature, as a way of protecting himself from pain. I think the only hope I now have of seeing my brother again lies with the Pharaoh. But not even the Pharaoh can defeat my brother’s darker half...without Seto’s help.”

“Seto’s…?” Mokuba’s gaze darted between Isis and the door, though he looked at Isis for a bit longer. “Well, alright...Let me just ask him…”

But Mokuba hesitated at the door. He didn’t remember it being quite so tall.

Isis put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s ask together, how’s that?”

“...Okay.”

Mokuba nodded, and they pushed the door open together. The moment that the office was exposed wide, he was glad that he wasn’t doing it alone.

The room smelled hot—burning metal mixed with something foul and acidic. The air was heavy with it. The sun was boring in through the windows, but that didn’t seem to make the room itself any lighter. Indeed, the sunlight just exaggerated everything--made the shadows too dark and reflections on the walls too angry and bright. Mokuba stepped over the threshold feeling as though every surface was glaring at him.

And what was perhaps the worst: he felt treacherous for entering, as if he were placing Seto under a microscope and preparing to pry him open. He wanted to walk in with his eyes closed—to see and hear and breathe in none of it, because his presence there felt like theft. He never talked about this feeling with anybody, but had he ever discussed the experience with Yuugi, he would have found it remarkably similar to what he had felt going into Atem’s soulroom.

The floor was scattered with the brutalized remnants of Seto’s duel disk, dissected with surgical precision and distinctly non-surgical cruelty. Chairs were overturned, his desk was in disarray. Everything in the room testified to bloody carnage, chaos, wrath so precise and so powerful that every surface had been beaten into stunned silence. And in the center of it all was a sight that made Mokuba want to burrow deep into his own body—his brother, always so tall, so fearless—was sitting slouched at his desk, face towards the window, looking as small and shattered as the spot left over after a grenade hit.

“Uh, Seto?” Mokuba’s voice sounded especially soft and fragile now. He spoke quietly, as if afraid of drawing attention to himself as the last thing in the room that Seto had left to break. There was no reply. He waited a few minutes, exchanged worried glances with Isis, then tried again. “Se—“

“I heard you.” His voice was raw and cracked, as if he’d been badly burned from his lips down to his esophagus. He struggled to swallow. “Leave me alone.”

Mokuba was about to lead the way out when Isis broke in, startling all three of them. “Seto, _I_ would like to speak with you.”

Seto’s back rippled through a wide range of emotions before he replied. “I don’t have time for any more stories about faeries and unicorns. Go away.”

Isis took a deep breath, kept her voice and shoulders level and strong. “Leave this to me, Mokuba,” she said.

“Uh…” Mokuba glanced up at her and wrinkled his brow. “Are you sure--” He  did not finish the question because Isis simply gazed down at him, calmly, and smiled. He shook his head and shrugged as he left. “Well, if you say so…”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I know, Seto.”

“You here to laugh at me?”

“No, I would never do such a thing.”

“To gloat?”

“No.”

“To _sympathize_ with me? To tell me that we’re all losers in this thing together so in the end none of it even matters?” He snarled, hard enough for Isis to hear his teeth gnash.

“I assure you, I have no such intentions. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

He snorted. “Just go away. I don’t want to talk to anyone.” He shook with an involuntary shudder that made the whole room seem cold.

Isis couldn’t take her eyes off him. “I’m here to tell you a story.”

“I’m tired of your stories.”

“Not of this one.” She paused for a moment, blinking rapidly to keep her sight from blurring and breathing deeply, slowly, hoping that the burning feeling her in chest would subside. “I--I inherited the Millennium Necklace after my father died. I never asked for it. Whether or not I wanted it was a question I never would have dared ask. It was my task to carry the Necklace, so I carried it, and that was all.”

“So you got dealt a piece of ugly jewelry.”

“It made me see things..differently. When I first began to use it I could not control it. The visions came unbidden and--” She ducked her head briefly and pulled her lips into a thin line to keep her mouth from falling open. “They were often quite dreadful. But they made me reconsider the world, and...my place in it. I could see these--lines of influence and control that stretched thousands of years through history. These unbreakable chains of cause and effect that were...paralyzing. I felt myself powerless to stop them. I felt myself as being swept up into a powerful current that would drown me without the slightest sympathy and--and I could only watch these events unfold and do nothing to prevent them….But I don’t see that anymore. The guidelines from the past are still there but they no longer converge at a single point--they scatter on the horizon. Do you know why that is?” She paused and took another long breath. “It’s because of you, Seto Kaiba.”

He turned just enough to look at her out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t try to pin your problems on me.”

“It’s not a problem. I could see the point that we were advancing to--the terror and bondage of it. And perhaps that is still where we will go, in the end. But my hands are free now, and now, this is the first time that I’ve truly felt that anything is possible--that, if I fight for the future that I want to see, then I can help create it.” She took a small step forward and placed her hand on the edge of Seto’s desk. “But I am also quite confused. You told me that you believe in your future. But, then, why now are you so resigned?”

Seto’s arms were crossed across his chest, and Isis could see his fingers dig into his sleeves. “You don’t know me.”

“Yes I do.” She almost laughed, and her voice rang like a bell. “The world knows you, Seto Kaiba. You have ensured that. People the world over know your name and what you represent. And now, with the powers of my necklace diminished, I see it, too. Your faith is in your nature. The only thing that could be keeping you from it now--it must be fear. But what are you afraid of?”

He lept up. “I’m not afraid of anything! Don’t mock me!”

Isis looked at him, eyes following the harsh lines of his face. She watched him breathe until his skin began to cool. “The vision that you saw…”

He snorted. “I didn’t _see_ anything.”

“Seto...why are you so unwilling to tell your own story?”

“My _what_.”

“The chain of events that has brought you here. It stretches much further back than you dare let yourself imagine, don’t you--”

“Can it.”

“Don’t you feel the longing to understand?”

“Not particularly.”

She was silent for a long moment. And Seto was more silent. “I don’t believe that.”

“That’s nice. But I think we both know by now that your track record there is not the best.”

“I believe in you.” She smiled as Seto fell so silent so quickly that he seemed to absorb all the sound in the room. “I think that I believe in you more than you do.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Isn’t it? I think that you could do anything you set your mind to, but you,” she pointed to the stack of cards on his desk. “You know how to defeat the God Ra, but you don’t believe that you can help. Anything you can imagine you can create. So why can’t you imagine this? Why is this not a part of your future that you are willing to believe in?” She paused. “Are you afrai--”

“I’ve never been afraid of anything!” He seethed for several moments. “Look, lady, my--my future ended up there! I don’t have one anymore, okay?! That was it! It’s over!” He bit down hard on his bottom lip and glared at her. He held his breath for a long moment, counting the clouds that passed across the sun, the waves that crashed against the rocks below them. “I don’t want to have anything else to do with this. Go ask somebody else.”

Isis nodded but she didn’t leave. She remained facing him and spoke quietly. “Are you afraid that your help will not be enough to save him?”

“I’ve never helped anyone.”

“That’s not true, Seto. You helped _me_. You saved my life. If you can do that, I think you can do anything.”


	6. Karma Police

Karma Police

“He’ll never learn, will he?”

He looks so small and insignificant on the screen. His eyes are alive and on fire, burning so hard that they must be melting the insides of his brain. But the rest of him is tiny and pathetic. I feel embarrassed for him.

Yuugi, on the other hand, looks so confident and carefree at the other end of the table that it makes me sick. Leaning back in his chair as if he owns it, as if he owns _me_. There’s something murderous in the air around them, like they’re sitting on the thick, wet tongue of a giant sea monster and it’s about to clamp down its teeth and devour them. Yuugi sneers, his whole face becomes contorted and demonic. He’s clearly not human. Something in that twists me from the inside like he’s got a hand on a wrench screwed around my guts and isn’t going to let up until they’re spilling all over the floor.

He chuckles, a slow angry bubble like magma burning in a pit. “He thinks that he can do anything he wants, doesn’t he? Just _step outside_ the laws of good and evil, and not face any consequences. But that’s not true, is it? Not if I have anything to say about it.” He pauses. “Kaiba’s up there, cowering in his office. He’s completely safe, for the moment at least. But you, Mokuba, what has your brother’s hubris done for you lately? You’re going to lose to me now and you’re going to be punished for trying to stop me, while your brother just sits there and--watches!” He affects a shrug. “A coward like that doesn’t seem worth dying for to me.”

Mokuba embodies my anger perfectly. Spit flying, fists shaking, he glares at Yuugi from across the table. “Shut up about us!” He cries. It’s a pitiful sound—his death cry. “I’m going to beat you! I’ll prove you wrong about me—about Kaiba!” He’s very earnest. He makes his next move so triumphantly that for a moment I almost want to believe him.

Yuugi’s eyes light up again and he wags his finger. When he gets in these moods he almost seems to glow, as if instead of a heart he has a coal-fired engine. “Are you _really_ so sure about that?”

He doesn’t think. “Yes!”

He’s wrong, though. He won’t win, not today and likely not ever. I’ve arranged it that way. I am the only one who will ever defeat Yuugi, and I’d rather die than give that honor to anybody else, including my little brother. There’s no device precise enough to inflict the kind of damage I want done to him, nothing that can hurt him deeply enough. Not even death would be sufficient to destroy him. I want him gone, picked apart and written out of history—erased so completely that not even the memory remains. And I want it to hurt. A lot.

“I’m not _wrong_ , Mokuba. Don’t think that you can run away from this. You may think that you’re doing the honorable thing—protecting your brother—but you’re really only prolonging his torment. Do you really think that the Seto Kaiba who pointed you into this chair is worth defending? He sold you out.”

“Shut up--you! I--I wanted to face you!” Mokuba’s anger is his greatest weakness. It blows through him and burns him out. We can both see it, Yuugi from across the table and me through the cables that connect the observation room to the dueling arena. We can see that he’s fading, his moves becoming increasingly erratic, and it’s only a matter of time until the anger that’s burning inside him eats him alive.

I could end it whenever. My finger flirts with the switch that could disable the electricity.  I could deactivate the cage, all the illusions that I programed, I could save him. But I won’t. I want him to learn from what he’s done. Let him choke on his own pride and ignorance, like bile rising up in the back of his  throat. He needs to learn that actions have consequences. And if he thinks that this punishment is painful then he doesn’t know pain.

“Did you really _choose_ this, though?” He twists in his chair and smirks, just to show that he can--that the monsters don’t scare him. Of course they don’t. He’s one of them. “Or was there someone else behind the scenes, pulling at your strings?” He looks away from the table, directly at the security camera, right through me. I feel my body burn and shiver at the same time and it makes me want to hurt him more, to run him down into the ground until I force the honor out of him. His gaze is placid. He doesn’t blink. “I won’t blame you, if you choose to surrender now.” He turns away, runs his fingers through the long spikes of his hair. “But I suppose it’s your choice to make.”

Mokuba is on the brink of falling apart. I can see four, five moves into the future of this game—the structure of his moves is that predictable and transparent—and I can see now that he’s going to lose, soon, and badly. My fingers dig into the arms of my chair, I press my face so close to the screen that their faces become just dots of colored light, virtually indistinguishable. I want to see it. I want to watch it happen. I want to see it all fall apart and smolder like the wreckage that Kaiba Corp always leaves behind and I want to know that this is something I have done.

I know that Yuugi can see what I see. He’s looking at Mokuba like he’s going to eat him. The shadows are already starting to lurk in closer, just as I’ve told them to. They’re probably all that Mokuba can see now, those turbid scowling faces and fierce, impaling fangs. On the screen, he trembles and shivers, as if he can feel their presence physically around him. The design must be more realistic than I had anticipated.

“This is your last chance to save yourself--if you end it now.” He speaks as if he’s delivering the oration and providing the applause in the same breath. He’s looking at Mokuba, but I know that he’s speaking to me. Mokuba is gasping, Yuugi is grinning wider than ever. I’m sitting at the table and suddenly I’m hunched over it and I can barely see or hear anything.  I’m breathing heavily and it’s like I’m only the point on the end of a needle and I have nowhere else to go. But I won’t let him beat me—oh no, not like this.

“I...believe in my brother...” Mokuba is having trouble speaking, and right now I don’t know which of them I hate more. One is so pitiful, so comically weak. The other is so rigid, so domineering, so eager to take advantage and uncaring of the consequences.

In an instant Mokuba is gone, engulfed in sea of fiery blackness, leaving only the echo of his screams behind. I notice a collective cringe ripple through the audience, but none of them stop watching.

He glares up at me. “Do you see now what you’ve done?” His eyes slide shut, he pushes back his shoulders, then raises his chin. When he looks at me again there is no triumph in his face. He shakes his head. “You really do think that you’re unstoppable, don’t you? When you close your eyes do you imagine that you’re so light that you could fly?” He chuckles and flexes his hands. “Just wait--I’ll drag you back down.” 


	7. Fitter/Happier

Fitter/ Happier

I leaned over the edge of the balcony, arms crossed like a child, lips pursed tight and jaw rigid. I could tell that I was fighting something, something that had bubbled up inside me quite unexpectedly and now needed to be carefully contained, lest I incriminate myself any further. I shook my head slowly, scolded myself for my behavior. It was just that—the past few years had been so tiresome, and so embarrassing…

I had a throbbing headache, and an oppressive weariness—as if all the sleep I had ever missed was suddenly catching up with me now, dragging me down and pressing me into the ground. I was exhausted. The whole world was emitting a kind of piercing, irritating buzz. That must be the static of indignation.

I leaned further over the edge of the boat, trying to catch a glimpse of myself in the currents racing down below me. I tried to comfort myself by thinking that in just a few hours I would be back on my way to Japan, and I would be able to put this whole horrifically surreal chapter of my life behind me. I could go back to the routine, something--familiar.

My thinking was interrupted by the sound of the door opening and closing behind me, and I spun around to see Jounouchi approaching me, his fists balled, back rigid, and eyes blazing with ire. I could practically feel the heat radiating off him. I knew as he came closer that I wouldn't have to listen—I knew exactly what he was going to say. It's like his brain only run on pre-scripted phrases. I wondered if there was a string dangling off his back that I could pull to make him talk--though it would be far more convenient if he came with a button that would make him shut up.

"And just what do you think you're doing, threatening my friend Yuugi like that? He didn't do anything to you! Just because you don't get a chance to duel the Pharaoh doesn't mean that you get to go around throwing a hissy fit and picking on everybody else. What gives you the right to force your own bad attitude on other people?!"

He took a step back, his face betraying both his confusion and his astonishment.

"How did you know what I was going to say?"

"We've been running in these same circles for years, I and all your little friends. I would be ashamed of myself if I hadn't memorized all your speeches by now."

"Hm…" he paused for a moment to recollect his thoughts. I could tell that I had taken the wind out of his sails, but to retreat now would be to admit that I was right, and he was too stubborn for that. "So, if you knew everything that I was going to say—why did you do it?"

I turned from him, shrugged, and didn't take my eyes off the water. "Let's leave the psychoanalysis for another time and just leave me alone."

"No, Kaiba, I'm not going to leave you alone! I'm not going to leave until you give me an explanation for what your problem is!" He stamped his foot to emphasize his point.

I could tell that he intended to stand by his word, but I had no desire to humor him.

"And what do you care about my  _feelings_. Aren't I evil to you?"

"...What?"

"You called me that once."

I studied his reflection in the moonlit water. It was clearer than mine. I could see him sway and twitch and fidget with a loose thread on his jacket as he tried to find the right words to smoothe over the truth. It occurred to me that he must have a very kinetic brain, the kind of mind that can't function unless the entire body is in motion.

"Well, you were—used to be." He said finally, almost resigned.

" _Used to be_? So I see I must have risen in your estimation. How  _flattering_."

"Hey, don't get too excited. You're only… _slightly_ evil now—it's not much of a compliment." His reflection took on a different series of angles now—he was more relaxed. Telling the truth. And trying to be kind to me.

I laughed softly. "Only  _slightly_ …yes, I suppose that would be an improvement in your eyes.  _Fortunately_  I don't spend too much  _time_  wondering whether I'm deemed morally _sufficient_ by that despotic _moral authority_ that seems to have the rest of you _held captive_ , so I suppose it's not too difficult for me to accept the idea of being only _slightly evil_. Indeed, considering what I'm capable of that’s actually an insult."

"Well, you were completely evil once and that didn't turn out very well for anyone."

We passed several moments in silence, listening to the sound of the current. He kept his eyes fixed on me and I kept mine on the water. We were clearly testing each other, trying to see who would give first. I clenched my silence tightly, refusing to be the one responsible for breaking it. But he was so persistent with his constant sloppy splatterings of questioning and sentimental looks.

"I don't believe that, you know. I've seen the way you treat Mokuba. Sometimes I think that you're not as evil as you pretend to be. But why is it so important for you to beat the Pharaoh like that? I mean, I'm as stubborn and competitive as the next guy, but even _I_ know when to give it a rest. It's not good for you to go on like this."

He was so irritating. "Just leave me alone, will you?! I don't need your comforting or your pep talks or your advice!" I snarled at his reflection in the water.

He shook his head at me, almost remorsefully it seemed. "I used to be just like you, you know Kaiba. I tried to solve all my problems myself, never talked to anyone, never _trusted_  anyone. I…felt like I couldn't, the kind of life I was leading. I had so many secrets that no one really knew the real me, not even _I_ did. I thought that that was the only way things could be. And I was miserable without even knowing that I was miserable because--because I just thought that that was how everyone felt all the time! But after I met Yuugi everything changed for me. He made me see things differently--see _myself_ differently. He made me want to be a better person, and I can't really say that about anyone else. And that's why I don't understand why you seem to hate him so much. It seems to me that if you guys could be friends it would make life a lot easier for you. And he wants to be friends with you, we all do. But you don't make it easy for anyone, always pushing people away.

"I mean, I've been through some of the same dark places as you have. I've been hurt by people that were supposed to protect me. I've done bad things, and I used to think that I was outside the law, better than what other people said was right and wrong. I've been a loser and a jerk and a lost little kid who didn't dare look five years into the future because I didn't know if I was even going to be  _alive_  then. I've been in the gutter, and I got out. But I couldn't have done it alone.

"Look at me." I refused to look at him. "I'm living proof that you can be ambitious, you can have goals and be proud and be stubborn and obnoxious,  _and_  you can also be _happy_. Losing a game doesn't mean you have to lose your life, making a mistake doesn't mean that you have to spend the rest of your life punishing yourself. But to get better first you have to admit that there's something wrong."

His voice washed over me like those waves that had been washing over the shore for a thousand years, and some of it began to percolate.

"Used to be like me…would make life easier… _better_..than I am?"

"Yeah, exactly! If you could just learn to put your pride aside every once in awhile, it would make you so much happier…better!"

"Less evil."

"More productive."

"Comfortable."

"You'd get along better with people."

"At ease."

"Would be more patient."

"You'd probably even sleep better."

"No bad dreams. No paranoia. No longer afraid of the dark."

"Not so desperate."

"Or childish."

I shook my head to clear the sound away, but it still buzzed in my brain and wouldn’t leave me alone. And that one phrase remained, the one that trumped them all, towering over me with its haunting incredibility.

"Used to be like me..." I sneered. "How could you ever be like _me_? Or, perhaps a better question, how could _I_ be like  _you_?"

I glared at his reflection in the water, so intensely that I could feel my body’s center of gravity tipping over the edge, preparing to pull me down. In the evening light our reflections seemed to blur, merge together until they were indistinguishable.

I spun around to face him, and he wasn't there.

I really did know his voice too well.

I really needed to get some sleep.

 


	8. Electioneering

Electioneering

A lot of people think that before my hostile takeover, Kaiba Corp was an arm’s dealer. People conjure up these gross, romantic images of blood-drenched soil, limping refugees, entire cities reduced to ash and rubble and a bunch of not-quite-people that they pity for a moment--then forget.

Those images aren’t wholly inaccurate. I know—I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. But they miss the point completely. What you see on the news or read in the paper—that’s not war, it’s theater. And it’s pointless. Because what you see on the battlefield doesn’t actually matter. It’s just the final domino to topple in a chain of events that’s been a long time in the making.

And how do I know that? Because I was there, too. I was the one who knocked the first one over.

I was never a soldier but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t taught how to fight. And the way that I was taught—I learned to get pretty creative with my weapon selection. There’s a thrill that comes with shaming a man in front of his subordinates, and doing it so politely--with a smile--that he doesn’t even know whether he should be fighting back. That’s a kind of violence you don’t see reported in the papers. I personally oversaw the termination of fifteen hundred long-term Kaiba Corp employees before I even knew what a hand grenade looked like. And I loved it. We all did. When you take the experience of reducing a man three times your age to tears in the middle of a board meeting and compare that to an hour or two locked up with a technical manual and a computer simulator—well, it’s obvious which one is more exciting. What can I say—I loved to win.

What many people don’t realize is that Kaiba Corp’s battles ended in the trenches but they started in our penthouse executive suite. And there were no conscientious objectors. There were a lot of other things we didn’t have either: détente, alliances, the Geneva Convention. Another thing we didn’t have—the actual concept of an army. When you’re in an army you can at least count on the fact that the men fighting alongside you are actually on your side. We lacked the loyalty.

I hated them all. I loved to tear them apart. I had no qualms about locking my co-workers out of their offices, inflicting malware on their computers, piling them with deadlines, either refusing to answer their questions or deliberately misdirecting them. I pitted them against each other. I got used to the idea that no one would ever give me a straight answer, so I stopped listening to what people said or caring about what they wanted. And at the end of the day, when I stumbled home exhausted, it didn’t matter to me if my father hit me, so long as I knew that the next morning I’d get up and I’d get to hit someone else even harder.

I never got a break. After a point I didn’t want one. Gozaburo trusted my intuition, but still never passed up an opportunity to mold me. He used to pass me notes under the table during the meetings I attended with him, making sure I took note of one man’s posture or another’s posturing. I felt a sharp and satisfying rush as I observed them, noting their weaknesses and deciding how I would utilize them to my advantage. I was so unlike them.  I was so much smarter, faster--stronger. And I was completely impervious to anything that they might try to lob at me. I was a glistening dive bomber, one thousand feet high. I was completely unstoppable and always on top.

I had to know how far I could take it.

I never realized how afraid I was. All the time.

I don’t think I knew that I was afraid until I watched Gozaburo tumble to his death out that window. I realized it then because in all the hours I had spent fantasizing about that moment I had always expected it to feel great. I thought I’d come out of that shareholder’s meeting with victory flags waving. I thought that I would be setting an impressive example: look, everyone, this is what will happen to the next idiot who tries to cross me.

But it didn’t play out that way. I watched the faces of everyone in that room--the faces that I had spent years memorizing--and in that moment I realized that I was setting a precedent. I couldn’t trust a single one of them not to stab me in the back at the first available opportunity. How could I not have been terrified.

That was another thought to lose sleep over.

Deterrence feels a hell of a lot better than disarmament until it doesn’t.

It’s funny, up until the very moment that it happened I was convinced that driving my father to his death was the most courageous thing that I had ever done. But it wasn’t. Disarmament--that takes strength.

I shudder at the thought that Yuugi might actually have been right about something.

 

 


	9. Climbing Up the Walls

Climbing Up the Walls

It’s dark out now. It’s late. I know without having to turn around that the lights of the office building across the street are trying to stare me down—those of them that are still burning, in any case. It doesn’t bother me. I’m used to being regarded in that way, with a mix of repulsion and envy.

Nights like this I feel like I’m the only one alive. I spend my days trying to communicate with sleepwalkers, these zombies who gaze up at me with pale undead eyes and blank, vapid expressions. I keep looking to find someone who can stand on my level, who can scale the same heights without stumbling and continually glancing down to the ground below. The daylight hours are almost insufferable, living in this watered down world where all the colors are muted and every sound is muffled by the white noise of idiocy.

During the day I am alone in spirit, at night I am in alone in practice—and this seems to make more sense to me. Amid the abandoned offices I can think without being distracted. There’s nothing holding me back. I can sit here and walk through walls if I feel like it. Everything is manifested to me in its full glory. I find the isolation invigorating.

During the day I allow my mind to unfurl and my body to go lax because I face no real competition in that realm. But at night, surrounded by nothing but this silence and this nascent darkness, I can finally feel myself waking up. I meet my match here, and I wrestle with him in the darkness. He is my one true rival, the one man I will race with my entire life until my legs give out and I collapse in an exhausted heap inside my own spent body.

There was a time when this man was me. Well, not me exactly, but the image I had of myself in the future. What I expected myself to become. My worst enemy was my own face in the mirror because I had to look at it every day and watch it age faster than I did. I was outside myself—I loomed larger than my own body, and the passage of time just reminded me of how much ground I still had to make up. My own dreams and expectations never missed an opportunity to exceed and humiliate me.

But I allowed this. I embraced it. Because this was a competition I had never really expected to win. I didn’t want to. To finally overcome my own expectations would mean that I had reached my own limits of greatness, that there would be nothing more to attain.  Nothing left to think about. That victory would have been completely bitter. It would have been the end of my life. So this was one game that I was proud to lose, and I hoped to go on losing it.

But all that changed when I met Yuugi—the other Yuugi. Yuugi Moto means less than nothing to me—when he’s not in the duel arena. Nine tenths of the time he’s just like everybody else—dull around the edges, meek, boring. But every once in awhile he manages to form a coherent thought and it’s like a ray of sun coming down and striking me directly in the face—and it burns.

Behind his deck of cards he becomes everything—everything I never believed I would find in another human being. I saw it in his face the first time he defeated me and it struck me with such a jolt that I was certain my heart had stopped beating. When I got my ECG report back later I saw that it actually had. It was like I had had my face slammed in the dirt, then forced to jerk my head up and acknowledge that the earth was orbiting the moon. And in that moment I knew that my race was finally over. I would never have to face myself so long as he was there to challenge me.

I wish my mind didn’t retrace these same circles. I’ve thought all these thoughts before, and yet I continually force myself to revisit them even though they’ve all been tattooed in my memory. Even sitting here now I can’t help but hear his voice in my head, low and melodious and full of teeth. It’s enrapturing.  I can feel him sitting in my skull, rubbing me between his fingers, grinning because he knows that he’s got me locked in a box that he’s about to saw in half, and then he’ll pry the lid off of and force me to stagger out without a scratch on me that I can see.

The moment he handed me my first defeat me robbed me of my greatest rival, my greatest inspiration, my most reviled hero—that platinum-plated vision I had had of myself as this conqueror of all possible worlds. And he pasted his face everywhere mine had been—guaranteeing that everywhere I turned I would see him, that I would see the stamp of his influence on everything that had once been mine, created by me and for me alone.

He robbed me of my future in that moment—perhaps of my past as well. He took the best in me and bent it into something that I couldn’t and still can’t recognize as my own. He took my eyes off the future and forced me to look at him instead!

And look, even now I can’t stop talking about him.

I left myself waiting back there.

And I don’t know what to do now. Who is waiting for me now? What—whose prize am I running for? Do I keep chasing him or—

Either way, I need to find a way to keep losing. Cause just existing’s not enough.


	10. No Surprises

No Surprises

After it all ended I made a journey that I had never expected to take. It wasn’t my idea. Mokuba was still somewhat shaken and confused about the events that had transpired over the past several years, and he expressed an interest in visiting our childhood home. Initially, I was dismissive, and I became increasingly irritated every time he broached the subject. It was not that I disrespected his wishes, but I couldn’t understand them. Our former life has always struck me as largely irrelevant—a small footnote at the end of a voluminous text that inspires little curiosity and invites no explanation.

However, as I am sure is common knowledge by this point, Mokuba’s mind is not the same machine as mine, and I wouldn’t have it otherwise. So we set out for this journey into the past.

Our time-traveling expedition took us through the blustery suburbs of Moscow and through a labyrinth of towering monolithic gray-faced apartment complexes that make the horizon look small by comparison. To make matters worse, we didn’t speak the language, neither of us could remember the exact address of our childhood home, and all records on the matter had been lost, reducing us to the state of vagabonds circling the same streets in an erratic, purposeless stupor.

I had just about neared the end of my patience when I heard Mokuba gasp beside me then fall completely still, as if all the air had been forced out of him. I turned to where he was looking and felt a similar shock—there it was. Quiet, unassuming, it almost blended into the background. But it touched me with a sharp pang. I stepped away. I decided to let Mokuba have his moment and then we would leave as quickly as possible.

I waited for a minute, carefully counting off the seconds on my watch, but he was still standing transfixed, his eyes and whole mouth hanging open.

 “Okay, you’ve seen it. Can we _leave_ now?”

 “We came all this way and you just want to turn around and go back?”

“Yes. That it precisely what I want. Now are we going or not?”

He was silent for another moment. “Doesn’t it make you think…of what might have happened if we had never left here?”

“No.”

“How can it not? Our lives might have been completely different if…Dad” (he uttered the word with the uncertainty of someone taking their first stab at a foreign language) “hadn’t died.  I mean, our lives would have been completely different! We never would have gone to Japan or met Yuugi or Isis….there’s so much that never would have happened…” He left out the one thing that we both could have done without having had happen.

I sighed. “I don’t think about those things because there’s no point. We can’t change it now.”

“I know.” We continued to stand for a moment, watching the sun blink in and out of view behind the clouds.

“I know it doesn’t change anything, but there were times when we were in danger, or I thought you were in danger, and I couldn’t help but wish that things hadn’t turned out this way. Like, maybe if something had been different then we would have been happier if we could have just been…normal.” He shrugged. “It’s stupid I guess. I mean, we’ve turned out pretty good and we’ve had some pretty cool adventures, but…I just wanted to know what it would feel like to come back.”

“But this isn’t what you wanted, is it?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t feel like I thought it would.”

He’s right. The buildings, the trees, the streets—the whole city itself feels like it’s been rendered in miniature. Everything seems so small and distant, it’s too unfamiliar to be placed in any meaningful context. Letting my eyes wander over the sweeping banks of black windows and trying to project my memories onto them is like trying to rebuild a shattered puzzle—like trying to fix something that fundamentally wants to stay broken.

He can feel it, but he can’t articulate those thoughts. The only thing that he can express is disappointment. What he can’t put into words is the realization that by returning to this place he was trying the lock on a gate to a life that no longer exists, and no matter how hard he turns that key it won’t be enough to bend the fabric of space-time that keeps us on the other side. Because time only goes one way. At least, most of the time.

We take the bus back into the main city, having not trusted our own car on the more precarious streets. It’s rush hour, and the bus is packed with drooping faces and stooped shoulders, people asleep with their eyes open, ready to retreat from the day.

 I wonder if this was the life that Mokuba was talking about when he spoke of normalcy.

I won’t attempt to draw the line between genetics and environmental circumstance, to try and find a perfectly linear cause and effect relationship between each variable that has interceded into my life and helped shape me, but here, drifting through the streets of Moscow I feel that same tug—the pull I felt lying unconscious on my foster parent’s floor, a metal hook looped around my ribs that tugged me forward when I first laid eyes on the Blue Eyes White Dragon card, on Yuugi, on Gozaburo. It was like someone from behind tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that the life I wanted would never bear the faintest resemblance to what anyone would consider “normal.”

Because what’s normal for most people is stultifying—it’s going through life without meeting rivals and thus without making progress, it’s never looking beyond your immediate goals to what could be greater, it’s staring idly at your life as it rolls over and slowly fades to black and never being surprised by anything.

The truth is, even if our birth parents had never died and their family had not forsaken us, I still would have found a way out of whatever small and comfortable life that they would have circumscribed around me. Maybe that’s a destructive impulse. Or maybe it’s not. The universe was empty until it exploded.

As we watch the buildings drift by in the glaze of the setting sun I wonder if this homecoming felt so alien because this city has never been my home at all. Through the window every view seems so fleeting, a moment snatched away too quickly to be fully understood or appreciated, and there’s something about that that I can’t help but let reverberate inside me. Because every experience I’ve ever had, no matter how momentous it seemed at the moment, has whittled away in time. Even those identities—those states—that felt like they would last forever had a way of dissolving around me.

Maybe by returning here Mokuba was hoping to make those moments last a little longer, to find something solid and permanent at the end of all this constantly eroding terrain that we could say was definitively ours. Maybe he wanted to find one thing that he knew would last forever, only to realize that is has long since disappeared.

I watch him out of the corner of my eye, ruffle his hair, and manage to catch the tail end of his rueful smile. When I’m with him I could be anywhere—any spot on earth, any time, it wouldn’t matter. I could roll the dice a thousand times. I could climb to the peak of the universe and gaze out over every conceivable set of possibilities that could have been my life—and I would still choose this one. Every time.

 


	11. Lucky

Lucky

A resurrection. That is how history will remember it. At this very moment, on the wind and in the waters there are whispers of rebirth; even the ashes seem to stir with some kind of burgeoning awareness of the sweeping changes taking place around them. Egypt has been saved from the brink of total collapse, pulled off the ledge of destruction, has both obliterated all evil and sent it running for cover. A hero has risen from the rubble and assumed the responsibility of restoring balance, peace, and serenity to a world that has forgotten how these words feel on the tongue and in the back of the throat.

I am that hero. At least, that’s what they tell me. The few surviving peasants, the even fewer surviving nobles. They come to kneel at my feet, eyes wet with relief and gratitude, convinced that now everything will be calm, that I will set the world to rights again. As if I could somehow change the passage of the stars.

I know what I ought to be feeling—pride, unabashed and glorious. In just a few short years I have elevated myself from the most squalid of common stock to the class of gods on earth. Elegantly dismantling every obstacle that was laid out before me, I have finally attained the position that I somehow sensed was mine for the taking as soon as I was old enough to formulate conscious thought. I should feel justified, righteous, as if I could wield the fiery power of the sun itself through my fingertips and force the world to bow to my vast and unlikely accomplishments. However, now that I have ascended, now that I have defeated everything and everyone that has ever stood in my way, I am not sure what exactly it was that I was fighting for.

They all crowd around me, as if the very act of being in my presence could somehow restore to them everything that they have lost. They do not voice their questions—they would not dare speak to me—but I can see the concern in their faces. What will I do to protect Egypt? How will I keep their world from falling once more into the smarmy grasp of evil?

The truth is: I will do nothing at all.

I did not save this world, if anything I have only endangered it. The root of this evil was half-sightedness—the muzzling of voices—those of the preferably unheard—the shuffling of bodies down alleyways and into gutters, the pursuit of a glorious and sprawling vision that could be poured like molten gold over the warm delicate earth until it was beautifully suffocated. And was I not a part of that? Did I not precipitate it? I spent my entire adolescence with my eyes trained on the Pharaoh’s palace, convinced it was the source of all light and happiness in this world. That was the ideal that I believed I was protecting when I fought in the name of the Pharaoh, it was what I believed I was defending as I harvested the souls of those very people who were in the most desperate need of my assistance.

But with every layer that has been pulled back from this mystery, the more convoluted and grotesque these ideals become. Perhaps it is true that I am not entirely to blame for all this. After all, I did not order the attack on Kul Elna. I used the powers of the Millennium Items in ignorance. I may not be guilty, but I am responsible. The sun is high and bright now and when I look out over the land I can see it casting far and wide—illuminating the entire landscape of what I have done. I cannot see one face without seeing them all. I want to flinch away from this endless sight, but I cannot.

And yet—the fact remains. This sun stretches far beyond even the land that I can see. I cannot fix this alone.


	12. The Tourist

_“The term ‘dialogism’ is most commonly used to denote the quality of an instance of discourse that explicitly acknowledges that it is defined by its relationship to other instances, both past, to which it responds, and future, whose response it anticipates.” – The Living Handbook of Narratology_

The Tourist

The moment he hits the ground I feel it too. The pain, the shock, the complete obliteration of consciousness stabs at me as if a sword had just been driven through my chest, and without being able to fully explain why I find myself buckled over, heaving, unable to see. I wrap my arms tight around my chest, almost an attempt to keep him out, and even though I was not his intended victim it feels like he has somehow snaked his way up through my brain stem and possessed me as well.

Suddenly I’m in my office in Japan, idly letting the Millennium Eye slide between my fingers and wondering how it is that one piece of ancient gold can render people so completely vulnerable and intensely helpless.

For a moment I’m looking over my shoulder at the sunset-splattered destruction of Alcatraz as it rears towards the horizon then collapses back into the shore. I can bite down and taste blood and I imagine it is the blood of everything I have ever destroyed and abandoned. I’m eating everyone that has destroyed and abandoned _me_ , chewing holes in my own tongue.

Suddenly I’m standing in Pegasus’ dingy basement, only able to look on in terror as the life force of the only person I have ever loved is robbed from me. And I am completely impotent. As his spirit goes I feel mine draining as well, as if my spirit was dependent on his, as if he has been keeping me alive this entire time and I had never noticed it until just now.

For an instant my vision blurs and all my limbs are fighting me. They’re staging an uprising, demanding that I stay alive. But my vision is just a narrow point of light. I’m breathing in burning ash and it’s staining my brain black. Every sound in the universe joins together in a kind of astringent, senseless scream, telling me that it’s time to die. It’s just a metaphor, of course, just an illusion. But it’s also real. And it’s familiar. One thing you never expect is that dying will feel safe. But it does. It’s comforting. It feels like coming home.

For a moment I’m standing on the table in the boardroom, my eyes burning a hole in that broken window. My hands are still hot and stinging, and I can feel the neat spider web trails of blood dripping off my fingers and onto the pristine white carpet floor.

For a second I’m seeing Noa for the last time, though I do not know that. Gozaburo pats me on the back, tells me I should be glad that I have won. I should be proud. Noa was the first of many adversaries that I will face, and my ruthlessness and exacting lack of compassion will certainly prove invaluable as I face the second set of challenges. I wonder where they are taking him, that little boy, but it doesn’t occur to me to ask. I guess that I don’t actually want to know.

Suddenly Mokuba is grabbing my finger at our father’s funeral, and I know that in that gesture he’s transferring that role to me. In his hand I hold the responsibility to be kind, to be wise, to always put his interests above my own and to protect him. I know that I have already failed to live up to these expectations, and at the thought that I have failed my first performance evaluation I grimace and feel close to fainting.

And, at last, I’m standing on the palace steps, and under the expectant eyes of my new subjects, I take the Millennium Puzzle and hurl it to the ground. As it shatters into dozens of golden pieces I realize that I have finally freed myself from the shackles of helplessness, from the continuous cycle of oppression, corruption, and misery and I realize that I have not understood a single event that has ever happened to me in my life until just now.

I didn’t want to tell these parts of the story, but I realize now that—to a certain extent—refusing to look far enough back into the past is an assault on the truth. It’s a kind of violence against myself.

As the last memory fades, I slowly regain consciousness. I feel like I’ve made some sort of gross violation—I have stolen someone else’s memory and stolen his life as well.

Or has he stolen mine?

I watch, unable to breathe, as he battles with that creature inside him, wrestling himself to the ground and writhing with agony--curling in on himself and collapsing as his own mind aims to destroy everything that his heart holds dear.  I watch as he clutches at his head and at his chest, realizing, gradually, with mounting horror, that the source of his unhappiness and his anger is all within himself--just lying latent and waiting for the opportune moment to metastasize. I watch as he wills himself to be free of some nameless evil, some persistent doom that has shadowed him his entire life, always just in the corner of his eye and impossible to confront directly. 

But no matter how hard he wills it, it’s just not good enough. No abstract intellectual commitment has never been enough to actually make him stop.

He would have lost it all if that girl hadn’t been there, willing to save him. I still think about that. If she hadn’t died for him.

With every moment he comes closer to freedom, and each step he takes makes me feel smaller. It feels like I’ve never opened my eyes before. I guess I haven’t.

And then there’s a breaking point. Like the sun cracking over the horizon and burning away the final traces of night. The sky lifts up and takes its weight with it, and I can finally breathe and I feel like I could lift up and fly anywhere.

Standing before me is the same man, and objectively I can see that we look similar enough. But I can no longer recognize him. His face is clear and composed, his eyes sparkling, standing so tall and so—calm. He is the same and yet completely transformed.

He stares at me in silence for a moment, his face is cool and coated with this contradictory kind of reserved empathy. Then he slowly turns away, calling over his shoulder. “You’re welcome.” His voice comes from every conceivable direction.

I stand rooted to my spot a moment longer, stunned, and shivering, feeling that my mass has been reduced by half. I watch as his figure diminishes but doesn’t actually get any smaller. I am certain that our paths will not cross again, the same way that parallel lines never meet. Voice shaking and senses still off balance, I can only stammer out one thing:

“Thank you.”

 

 


End file.
